He sniffs up another gob of blood and lets it fly into the puddle. “They said they were looking at selling her, that she was . . .” he says, and he grimaces as a wave of pain rips through him. “They said she was cute and ticked all the boxes. They were going to move her offshore in the next few days.”
“Doesn’t explain how her bag got into your car.”
“If you didn’t put it in there, then I don’t know how it got there.”
“And your fingerprints on her headband?”
His voice takes on a whiny quality and he says, “There’s a million ways that could have happened. Maybe I picked it up thinking it was something else. Maybe it’s been somewhere else other than on her. I don’t know. Maybe your tests are wrong. It’s your job to figure that shit out.”
“What about the ski mask I found in your glove compartment?”
He doesn’t say anything.
“You want to explain it to me?”
“It’s . . . it’s not what you think,” he says.
“Yeah? And what do I think?”
“It’s just a ski mask,” he says. “I wear it when I’m out hunting when it’s cold. That’s why shops sell them and why people buy them. Come on, Noah, I’m bleeding to death here.”
“Where is she, Conrad? You overheard them — where’d they say they had her?”
“I don’t know,” he says, and he’s crying now. “I swear I don’t know.”
I push my finger back into the wound. I fight the urge to gag. His body strains against the rope as he leans forward. His veins stick out and his face is as red as a face can get before something hemorrhages, usually in the eyes.
“Wait,” he says. I take my finger back out and I wait. “They mentioned the old Kelly place,” he says, and he’s blubbering tears and snot and it’s mixing with the blood and making a disgusting mess over his shirt.
“The Kelly place,” I say.
“The Kelly place,” he repeats.
I holster my gun and walk out of the office.
He yells out at me through the open door. “You’re dead, Noah. You hear me? You’re dead.”
“What the hell did you do to him?” Drew asks me.
I don’t answer him. I can’t. I hand Drew back his phone, head down the stairs and I don’t look back.
Two
Most of the trees in the few miles that surround the sawmill have been logged, regrown, and logged again. Various areas are in various states of regrowth, but the trees bordering the mill are young and fresh-looking and not much taller than me. The road out to the highway is a mile long and none of it straight. I take it quick. The air conditioning is running at full strength. The sawdust on my skin itches. I head south toward town. The nearest building to the sawmill is Earl’s Gas Station, the forecourt and highway out front all lit up like a football field. The owner is one Earl Winters, and he calls us every month or two when somebody puts buckshot into those lights, and every month or two we get no closer to figuring out who’s doing it. Could be one person. Could be lots of different people, since the lights are offensively bright. I blow past the gas station so fast I expect to see it dragging behind me, caught in my wake.
There are no lights on the highway. No signs of life. Out in this part of the country the world could have ended and unless somebody sent word to Acacia Pines none of us would know. The highway is the only road in and out of town. It cuts a swath through The Pines, where the ghosts of missing hikers are still out there walking in circles.
Every half-mile or so I pass ninety-degree turnoffs that lead to small farms and big farms and animal farms and vegetable farms. I pass barns painted red that during the day look like they’re floating on seas of wheat, but at night look like black holes on the horizon. It’s a ten-minute drive that I do in six. I take the turnoff to the Kelly farm. The large For Sale sign staked into the ground out front has faded as it baked and froze over the last three years’ worth of seasons. The road goes from asphalt to dirt and gravel and the back of the car fishtails and bits of stone flick up into the undercarriage. The house is on the other side of a set of oak trees that keep it hidden from the road. I drive around them and point the car at the front door and leave the lights on and get out. Plumes of dirt float up from the driveway and fog the air. The land out here is dry. Only stuff that grows is stinging nettle and gorse and patchy clumps of grass.
The house has lots of red wood and white trim, and an A-frame roof sharp enough to prick the sky. There’s a shed with no front wall next to it, a car and tractor in there with eight flat tires between them, the walls lined with hay bales. I send the beam of my flashlight looping around the porch and over twisted floorboards. There are cobwebs as long as summer evenings over all of it. Something scuttles across the porch and disappears. The headlights from the car and moonlight reflect off the windows. The door is locked, but it’s also old and neglected and doesn’t put up a fight. I figure in all the years the Kellys lived here this door was probably always unlocked. It’s that kind of town.
The house smells of dust and the air tastes of mold. The last time I was out here was three years ago when Jasmine Kelly called Drew from the other side of the country to say she hadn’t heard from her folks in a week. I flick the light switch but there’s no power. I follow the footprints in the dust. Floorboards creak under my weight. I can feel the heat coming up through the floor. Shadows move across walls as my flashlight lights everything up, and there are a lot of everythings — couches, a dining table, beds, kitchen utilities, a coffee table with magazines and a TV that can’t be any older than five years. There are paintings and photographs on walls and shelves. It feels like the house is waiting for somebody to return. I look into the bedroom where three years ago Ed and Leah Kelly took handfuls of sleeping pills and didn’t leave a note to say why. The farm was heavily in debt and their daughter used to say her dad thought the land was cursed because only the weeds knew how to grow.
I head to the basement. Basements are where men like Conrad Haggerty keep girls like Alyssa Stone. I open the door. It smells like something crawled out of the grave, died all over again, then crawled back in. I hold my breath and light up the steps. They groan as I move down them. The walls are gray cinderblock. There are tools hanging on them. There’s an old chest freezer big enough for a body, that I hope is empty. There are piles of blankets and an old dining suite with chairs stacked on top and boxes of junk beneath it. I can no longer hold my breath. The smell doesn’t improve any. There’s an old heater, a couple of bicycles, an old TV. There are shelves full of Christmas lights that could only be ready in time if the untangling started at Easter. The same dust that coated everything upstairs coats everything down here too, even the floor, but the floor also has footprints going back and forth across it.
I follow them.
I don’t have to follow them for long.
If anybody grows up being allowed to believe in curses, then it’s Alyssa. Her father gave his life to the sawmill in more ways than one. He started working there when he was sixteen, gave the place eighteen years of his life, then bled out on the factory floor after a spinning blade snapped, flew thirty feet through the air, and severed an artery in his leg. Alyssa was six months old. Three months ago a car accident took Alyssa’s mother out of the world. Her uncle took her in after that. I can only pray that this is the last bad thing ever to happen to her.
Right now, Alyssa is trying her hardest to blend into the mixture of paint cans and old board games in the corner. She’s shying away from my flashlight as if she’s lived in the dark her entire life. She looks gaunt and scared and she has a black eye from where somebody hit her. She’s looking out at me from behind black hair that is matted with grime and her face is streaked with tears. Looking at her makes me want to cry. It breaks my heart. I want to hug her and protect her and never let her go. I want to make the world okay for her, because so far for her the world